The night of the graduation party, Shen Yi slept with his sister’s best friend. On the first day of term, he stood outside a tiered lecture hall and saw the famously icy professor at the front of the room: the very woman who had shared his bed three days earlier.
Shen Yi, an engineering student admitted to graduate school through a recommendation program, was raised by his older sister. He had always treated her aloof best friend, Lin Qingxue, like an elder and kept his distance. But one night of losing control at his celebration banquet completely upended his life. Before the gentleman’s agreement they made after waking up had even had time to sink in, he discovered he was about to become a graduate student under his “one-night stand.” From then on, by day she was a devil of an advisor who made his academic life hell; late at night, she was his secret lover. Shen Yi found himself constantly swinging between being deliberately given the cold shoulder and being quietly protected.
From deliberate complications in the data-cleaning room to the aroma of oolong tea in the lab late at night; from a terrifying moment in the sports meet’s first-aid room to their first handhold beneath the starry sky at the science museum. He saw the clumsy side of a woman who was hopeless at everyday life beneath her cold academic mask, while she recognized the earnest determination in his impulsive youth. But when a jealous labmate filed a report and campus gossip pushed their teacher-student romance to the edge, they had to make a choice: retreat to the safety of separate sides, or stand hand in hand in the full glare of everyone’s attention.
This is more than the intense push and pull of a secret romance. It is all the proof that a boy grew into a man over three years. He spent his whole youth trying to reach her heights, and she used her entire future to catch him when he fell.
